Passing Through a Prairie Country by Dennis E. Staples

 

Somehow when I pulled this novel out of my TBR stack, I missed that it was kinda a Horror novel: Nothing wrong with that, just not really what I was looking for. Well, this was a shortish novel, around 250 pages, and it's pretty good. There are a lot of sequences that seem as though they might be muddled, but I think the characters' experiences are supposed to be muddled (or maybe reality itself) so I can't really call those passages mistakes. There are moments when knowing more about Ojibwe lore than I do (I know practically nothing, here) would clearly have been helpful, but the author really isn't duty-bound to relieve the reader's ignorance, and it's clear from text and context that these are Big Things--I have no complaints on this score. The characters are pretty clear, and the monstrous supernatural horror of the novel can plausibly be understood as a metaphor for the grim social horror of the rez (from what I can tell, just about any rez). The story kinda judders some, but nothing unforgiveable.